Les Téméraires

As an avid western watcher for over 60 years. I recently watched , The Raiders,for the 15th time. It still remains one of the, should have and probably was, made with the television watching audience in mind type movies. Boring and predictable, it puts me to sleep every single time I attempt to watch it.

The Raiders was one of the last films you will see made taking what was standard historical interpretation at the time point of view that the Reconstruction period was when the sadistic and moneygrubbing carpetbag governments squeezed the last ounce of pride from the fallen Confederacy. The Civil Rights revolution put an end to all of that.

The Raiders starts out as a cut down version of The Texans or Red River with Brian Keith trying with his fellow cattlemen to get that big herd to Missouri. Only they have far less success than Randolph Scott or John Wayne in those other classics. Beaten and beat Keith and his comrades go to Fort Hays and see temporary commander Alfred Ryder and railroad man Addison Richard. They veto a southern route and Keith says no southern route, no railroad at all.

At this point the film switches to something like Cecil B. DeMille's The Plainsman where Robert Culp, James McMullan, and Judi Meredith play Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Calamity Jane Canary respectively. Culp takes the lead in trying to avoid some big trouble, but Keith is proud and angry and Ryder is a tin soldier martinet who carries a Texas Minie Ball in his leg from the late Civil War. In fact Ryder has the juiciest role in the film.

I'm guessing this was a pilot for a possible TV series that Culp, McMullan and Meredith would have starred in. The Civil Rights Revolution and changing attitudes would make this kind of film unacceptable. You rarely saw southern heroes after The Raiders came out.

As it is it's no different than a lot of what was on television because it was meant for television. It might worked in 1953 even, but not in the Sixties.

Ex-Confederate Texan Brian Keith and some fellow ranchers, fed up with the low prices offered by carpetbaggers, drive their cattle up north to sell to the Army. They encounter a sympathetic Buffalo Bill Cody (Robert Culp) and Calamity Jane (Judi Meredith) and obstacles.

It's a theatrical movie, but it's lit and has a score like a TV western: bright colors like a 1960s Louis Lamour paperback, and intrusive music that tells you precisely how you're supposed to feel at any moment. The script by Gene L. Coon is sympathetic to the Texans; Coon is, of course, best remembered as one of the producers of the Original STAR TREK, which was pitched as "WAGON TRAIN in space"; Coon also wrote several episodes of the Western series.

Keith mumbles a lot of his line. He did that a lot.

As another reviewer has pointed out, "The Raiders" is a movie which takes what might be called a broadly neo-Confederate position about the years following the American Civil War. This position, which has been called the "Myth of the Lost Cause", holds that the Confederate cause during the Civil War was a just one, that the war had little if anything to do with slavery and was instead a "war of Northern aggression" which ended in the supposed injustices imposed on the defeated Southerners during the Reconstruction Era.

The main characters are a group of Texas ranchers, left financially destitute by the war. To avoid being exploited by corrupt Northern carpetbaggers, they attempt to drive their herds from Texas to the nearest rail-head in Kansas, but lose their cattle to attacks by bandits and hostile Indians. Despite having no cattle to sell, they ride on to Kansas where they demand that the Kansas and Pacific Railroad build a new railway line into Texas. When the railroad management refuse to comply with their demand, they (all seven of them!) form themselves into a guerrilla army to fight the railroad and prevent its westward expansion into Colorado. Despite the illegal nature of their activities, which today would probably be characterised as terrorism, the ranchers are presented as the heroes of the film, and the US Army officer (a Northerner, of course) who tries to stop them as the villain.

The film also features three legendary figures of the Old West- Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane and Buffalo Bill Cody- shown as taking part in adventures very different from anything they did in real life. A similar device, using the same three characters, along with a fourth, General Custer, was used in Cecil B de Mille's "The Westerner". Hickok is here normally referred to as "Jim", probably to distinguish between himself and Buffalo Bill. (Hickok's real name was James, but he was normally known by his nickname Wild Bill). The real Calamity Jane would only have been a teenager at the time of the events shown here, but the character played by Judi Meredith, who would have been 27 in 1963, is rather older. She wears tight leather trousers, in a style more that of the 1960s and 1860s. The makers of Westerns occasionally tried to make them sexier by dressing attractive young female characters in twentieth-century fashions which no nineteenth-century woman would have worn. (Think of Marilyn Monroe's equally tight jeans in "River of No Return").

This is a film with little going for it, quite apart from its objectionable political stance. The acting and the script are undistinguished. The ranchers' demand- that a publicly funded railroad should, on their say-so, divert its finances into the construction of an unauthorised branch line several hundred miles long- is both unrealistic and unreasonable, something the film-makers blatantly overlook. They also overlook the ridiculous nature of the idea that seven, mostly elderly, men- the most unlikely guerrilla army since Citizen Smith's Tooting Popular Front- could present any sort of serious threat to American military power. A plot like this one could, just about, have served as the basis for a comedy spoof Western like "Blazing Saddles". That the film-makers used it as the basis of a supposedly serious movie defies belief. 3/10.

In the tension-filled post-Civil War years, a former Confederate General-turned-Texas rancher is desperate for the Army and the railroad to lay their tracks south to help his economically-bedraggled state, aided and abetted in his mission by old friend 'Wild Bill' Hickok, a sympathetic 'Buffalo Bill' Cody, and a whip-wiedling, flame-haired Calamity Jane. Universal western mixes outdoor locations and backlot scenes with stock shots and a multitude of close-ups (which often don't match the long-shots), not unlike the popular television westerns of the era. Too-modern overall, with laughable scenes such as when Cody advises Jane to wear some makeup once in a while to attract men (she's already sporting more makeup--including lipstick and false eyelashes--than most saloon girls). Brian Keith has to play the lead as both goodhearted family man and guerrilla fighter on horseback, which is an intriguing combination that the filmmakers just fritter away. *1/2 from ****